Kilshaw brings optimism to Spotland

Rochdale Hornets’ new coach Alan Kilshaw at the club’s recent ‘Meet the Coach’ function

Many Rochdale Hornets’ supporters knew little about new coach Alan Kilshaw, however those in attendance at the club’s recent ‘Meet the Coach’ function left feeling optimistic.

As Kilshaw stood in front of a room full of inquisitive members and supporters ready to address their doubts it felt as though the club was taking a step into the unknown. Fast forward an hour and an extensive PowerPoint presentation later and a buzz filled the room, as the realisation that he is more than qualified for the position hit everyone.

After supporters left they did so with a smile on their face, eagerly looking forward to the next chapter in the club’s history.

With five years experience coaching at almost every age group as a development officer with Warrington Wolves he took his first job as head coach with Sarina Crocodiles in North Queensland. Over the past three seasons he has led the club to success from top to bottom and even assisted at their feeder club Mackay Cutters. Now he is looking to bring some of his experiences in Australia to Spotland.

Kilshaw explained: “I spent a bit of time in Sydney and visited some of the NRL clubs, St George (Illawarra Dragons), Canterbury (Bulldogs) and the (Sydney) Roosters, so I picked up a lot of them.”

“The (Mackay) Cutters were twinned with the (North Queensland) Cowboys who won the NRL competition and were the benchmark so I picked up some techniques from those clubs.

“On a personal level I developed my man management skills and I wanted to go out there and challenge myself and make mistakes which I can learn from. I wanted to find out what works and what doesn’t as a head coach and I have sort of had that apprenticeship now and I’ll bring a lot of what I have learnt from Australia into this group.”

Kilshaw started coaching at the young age of 23 after an injury disrupted his playing career with St Helen's, Warrington, Blackpool Panthers and Oldham. Since then he has worked his way through the youth academies at Warrington, and also assisted at England Youth for a year, but he was always eyeing up a job at the top so he could implement his own style of play upon a squad.

He said: “My ambitions have always been to be a head coach and in 2013 when I took the Sarina job I achieved that. It had got to a stage in my coaching career when I needed to go and coach my own team. If you’re at Warrington or England you are working within someone else’s structure and systems but I wanted to have my own and see if they worked.

“Once I realised I wasn’t going to make it as a player at the highest level then I wanted to be a coach. I live and breathe rugby league, I do a lot of reading on the game, I learn from other sports, I visit a lot of clubs and I’m always looking for that edge.”

Moving back to England to take up the job with Rochdale was a big decision for Kilshaw to take and he is looking forward to his toughest test yet.

His appointment as coach left him feeling proud and hopeful that he can etch his name into the great history of one of the sport’s founding clubs.

“I’m very privileged and excited to be head coach of Rochdale Hornets,” he added. “There is a mixture of emotions right now but they are all positive. As I have said before it is a club with a rich history and there is a real distinguished list of ex-coaches, so to add my name to that list is an honour. It is an honour to be heading up this team.

“Moving to Australian and being the only English coach, or Pommie as they call you over there, that was tough. Rochdale are probably at a similar level to Sarina but there is more scrutiny over here and probably bigger expectations because it is a big club. So I would say that it is the biggest challenge I have faced.”

Last season was a disappointing year for Hornets as they missed out on the play-offs by a point and were consigned to another year in League One.

With a new format in the division coming into place in 2016 the club is looking to improve and gain promotion back to the Championship as soon as possible. Kilshaw is confident of challenging for promotion and will be adding to the current group of players over the off-season to boost their chances.

He said: “If we can retain the majority of the squad, which we will do, and add a few players to offset the retirements and players that we are going to lose then I will be very confident of improving on last season. When you look at it they were only one win off (the play-offs) and they probably underperformed last year and if they got into the top five anything could have happened.

“I am confident that we can be challenging but you need a certain amount of luck throughout the year with injuries and suspensions. I can’t stand here and say that we’re going to get promoted but that will be the aim and we will be having a good go at it.”

Over the next couple of months Kilshaw will have assembled a squad and will be setting goals within that group to motivate the players to improve. Promotion is top of his list as the moment but the team will be taking it one step at a time in a process Kilshaw is confident will be successful.

He said: “We have to be challenging for promotion. In the long term we want to be getting into the Championship and being sustainable while hopefully developing a core of local players at the club and then adding some real quality players around them.

“In the short term we will just focus on the process which means we have a good pre-season and go week-to-week, putting some fundamentals in place and progressing as the season does. We will go short term and set some goals which will remain internal and hopefully achieve those.”